Dan Englesson

Master Thesis: Improving the visual quality of crowd systems for feature film productions

2012

Course: Master Thesis

Abstract

In this thesis, several different methods for improving the visual quality of a crowd system for
feature film production are presented. The implementations were made for the Moving Picture
Company for their crowd system software ALICE.The methods implemented and presented in
this thesis have made improvements on the basic skinning methods by introducing twisting and
scaling of the bones with a method called Stretchable and Twistable Bone Skinning. Also, complex
and detailed deformations on crowd characters such as muscle bulging and wrinkles on clothes,
are now possible due to the implementation of Pose Space Deformation methods which interpolates
stored complex and time-consuming deformations onto a mesh. Several known pose space
deformation methods were implemented and compared and resulted in an other method trying
to reduce the current pose space deformation methods' limitations and is presented as Three-Joint
Pose Space Deformation.In this thesis, a novel method for Dynamic Pose Space Deformation is
also presented and a dynamic spring-damper approximation deformation method was also
implemented, enabling crowd characters to have dynamic effects, such as jiggling of fat and
muscle bouncing, due to joint accelerations.